A COMPENDIUM OF SCALES for use in the SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

ends with some unanswered questions regarding the assessment of professor-student
relationships and call for future research in this area.
Immediacy Scale
Immediacy is the nonverbal and verbal behaviors that communicate liking, caring, and
approachability (Mehrabian, 1967; 1969). With regard to the classroom, immediacy refers to
students’ impressions of their instructors’ availability or psychological distance. Early
discussions of measuring immediacy came about in the late 1960s, with a focus on capturing
verbal and nonverbal communications of closeness (Mehrabian, 1969). Mehrabian identified
five primary immediacy behaviors: touch, physical distance between communicator and
audience, leaning forward, making and maintaining eye contact, and physical orientation
toward audience. While immediacy does not in and of itself represent rapport (immediacy is
behavior-based whereas rapport relates more to cognitive perceptions), it is considered a
catalyst and predictor of rapport and relationship-building (see above discussion of Figure 1).
Immediacy behaviors in the classroom received further exploration in the late 1980s (Gorham,
1988). Expanding on the five nonverbal behaviors outlined by Mehrabian (1969), Gorham
created one of the first validated immediacy scales that included both nonverbal and verbal
constructs. The 34-item scale contains 20 verbal items (e.g., “addresses students by name,”
“uses humor in class,” and “asks questions that solicit viewpoints or opinions) and 14 nonverbal
items (e.g., “gestures while talking to class,” and “smiles at the class as a whole, not just
individual students”). Students respond by rating the frequency with which each behavior
occurs on a scale of 0 (never occurs) to 4 (occurs very often). This validation study demonstrated
split-half reliabilities of .94 for the verbal items and .84 for the nonverbal items.
The original scale underwent some criticism when scholars argued that verbal behaviors
represented teacher effectiveness, not immediacy (Robinson & Richmond, 1995). Inspired by
this criticism, Wilson and Locker (2008) set out to empirically address this argument. Their
validation provided evidence for discriminant validity between immediacy and teacher
effectiveness. Further, their analysis of Gorham’s (1988) original scale produced four distinct
factors: 1) individual friendliness (8 items, α = .88), 2) flexibility during lecture (5 items, α = .80),
3) nonverbal immediacy (7 items, α = .76), and a single item assessing whether professors invite
students to address them by their first name. Further, based on their analysis, Wilson and
Locker (2008) recommended excluding the following three items: 1) “asks questions or
encourages students to talk”, 2) “refers to class as ‘our’ class or what ‘we’ are doing”, and 3)
“invites students to telephone or meet outside of class if they have a question or want to
discuss something” from Gorham’s (1988) original scale as these items did not add any
predictive value to the scale. The most final version of this scale is Wilson and Locker (2008).
Nonverbal Immediacy Scale
Whereas the updated immediacy scale (Gorham, 1980; Wilson & Locker, 2008) includes
measures of both verbal and nonverbal psychological availability, the Nonverbal Immediacy
Scale (NIS) focuses on nonverbal cues specifically (V. Richmond et al., 2003). This scale, which is
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